The following is an excerpt from the epilogue to Che’s Congo Diary,1 which, like his diary of the revolutionary war in Cuba’s Sierra Maestra, he had the opportunity to revise while he was in Tanzania from December 1965 to March 1966. His diary opens with the blunt statement, “This is the story of a failure,” but in it he draws crucial lessons for future struggles, especially in Latin America, from the positive and negative experiences of the Cuban internationalists in Africa.
Unlike Latin America, where the process of neocolonialism has developed amid violent class struggles and where the national bourgeoisie participated in the anti-imperialist struggle before its eventual capitulation, Africa presents a picture of a process planned by imperialism. Very few countries there have obtained their independence through armed struggle. On the whole, everything has happened with the smoothness of a well-oiled machine. In effect, it is only the southern cone of Africa that remains officially colonized, and the general outcry against that system is likely to bring about its rapid demise, at least in the Portuguese colonies. The Union of South Africa presents different problems.
In the African liberation struggle, the advanced stages of the process are similar to current models of a people’s war. The problem is how to root it more deeply, and this is where questions arise that I am unable to answer. I would simply like to outline a few points resulting from my feeble and fragmentary experience. If the liberation struggle is to be successful in the present conditions in Africa, it is essential to update some Marxist analytical schemas.
What is the primary contradiction of the epoch? If it is between the socialist and the imperialist countries, or between the imperialist countries and their working classes, the role of the so-called Third World will be significantly reduced. But there are more and more serious reasons to believe that the primary contradiction is between the exploiting and exploited nations. Here I cannot begin an attempt to demonstrate this point, and to show that it is not opposed to the characterization of the epoch as one of transition to socialism. It would lead us onto difficult side-roads and require a mountain of data and arguments. I will leave this as a hypothesis that has been suggested by practice.
In this case, Africa will play an active and important role in this primary contradiction. Nevertheless, if we take the Third World as a whole to be an actor in this contradiction, at this present time in history, then we can see that there are gradations between countries and continents. In summary, we can say that Latin America as a whole has reached a point at which the class struggle is intensifying and the national bourgeoisie has totally capitulated to the power of imperialism, so that in the short-term historical future, the liberation struggle will be crowned by a revolution of a socialist character.
1. Ernesto Che Guevara, Congo Diary (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press), 2011.